Women haunt the Prison Generation

Women in shackles, women in prison, haunt accounts of prison.

In the U.S., some say it’s time to “Redeem the prison generation“: “The least popular constituency in America. People we’d rather forget. Last year, a record 1 in every 100 American adults was in prison. One in every 30 men aged 20 to 34. And among black males in that age group? One in 9. Why? Because America’s crime and punishment policies reflect an incoherent mix of motives: justice, retribution, vengeance, the illusion of expedience, the cruel bigotry of nonexistent expectations. And absent decent job training, counseling, and re-entry programs, the system only incites violence and invites recidivism. It’s past time to reconsider our approach to prisons, for practical reasons – and because it seriously undermines our effectiveness as a society and our moral authority with other nations. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we cage almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners – a trend that has accelerated wildly since the 1970s. If the 2.3 million Americans now behind bars joined the 5 million on parole or probation to form a city of their own, you’d have a population nearly twice that of Los Angeles. Feeling safer yet? You shouldn’t.”

The prison generation. Not quite the Coke or Pepsi Generation, but then again, not quite not the Coke Generation. Are there any women in this account of the Prison Generation? Of course not.

But there are women in prison, some for their own `protection’, for their own `good’.

A woman is “jailed for her child’s own good?“: “A judge in Bangor, Maine — ignoring federal guidelines — has doubled the sentence of a Cameroonian woman charged with possession of false immigration documents. Was there something extra-heinous about the nature of her crime? No. Despite protests from the defense and the prosecution, U.S. District Judge John Woodcock sentenced Quinta Layin Tuleh, 28, to 238 days in prison — twice her time served, which would be standard sentencing practice here — because she is HIV-positive and pregnant. Her release date, in fact, is her due date. From today’s Bangor Daily News: “Woodcock said the sentence would ensure that Tuleh’s baby, due Aug. 29, has a good chance of being born free of the AIDS virus.”

“Woodcock reportedly informed Tuleh at her May 14 sentencing that he intended the longer term not as punishment for her, but as protection for her unborn child. He said that the defendant was more likely to receive medical treatment and follow a drug regimen in federal prison than out on her own or in the custody of immigration officials,” says the News, adding that his decision, he said, was based entirely on her HIV status; if she were pregnant but HIV-negative, he’d have left it at time served. (Some drug regimens have proven effective at preventing HIV transmission from mother to fetus.)….

“”My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant,” Woodcock stated, “and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying. I don’t think that the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault. If I were to know conclusively that upon release from imprisonment a defendant was going to assault another person, I would act in a fashion to prevent that, and similar to an assault, causing grievous injury to a wholly innocent person. And so I think I have the obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.”

“If Tuleh’s child is indeed born here, he or she would be a U.S. citizen. But an immigration expert told the News that an infant would most likely be deported along with the mother.”

Tuleh is not in shackles, and yet she is. If her fetus comes to term, if the child is born, in the United States, that person will and will not be a U.S. citizen, and it, not he and not she but it, will be deported. The Prison Generation … a new line of U.S. exports. The Prison Generation, haunted by the women, and especially the women of color, who never get a mention.

(Image Credit: thebody.com / Project UNSHACKLE)

Haunts

Welcome to `Haunts’, a new series about prisons, police, women.

A specter is haunting the world, or so one could believe from reports and blogs. Consider these:

“My Great Recession: Economic Downturn? When Was It Ever Up?”, RaceWire, May 21, 2009:
“Economic downturn? When was it ever up? I have been dealing with poverty and economics since I was a child in Guatemala- now as a young adult in this country its even harder for me to find a job, get housing or go to school. It makes me feel empty like a ghost, because I feel I have a lot to offer. I have survived gangs, drugs and migration. Im not sure how I will survive this.”

“Spooks haunt our democracy”, Mail & Guardian, May 22, 2009

And then there’s “Quarto”, a poem by Adrienne Rich, in The Nation, which begins:
1.
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over
The map of my battlefields. Marathon.
Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho.
Battle of the Overpass.
Victories turned inside out
But no surrender

Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears

There have been others in the past couple days. The world is indeed haunted by specters, ghosts, revenants (revenants means “literally that which comes back”), and for some, it was Jacques Derrida, in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, who drew attention to ghosts around us as part of the new world economic order. Derrida noted that the first noun of the Communist Manifesto is specter. We note that the first verb, the first action, is haunting.

The home of specters, of ghosts, of revenants is prison. The place where people are and are not, visibly invisible, a zone of hyper-monitored abandonment. Say `recidivism’ to anyone, and they’ll know you’re talking about prison, about prisoners.

There are more people in jails and prisons today, globally, than ever before. There are more people in jails, prisons, detention centers in the U.S. than ever imaginable. There is more money being made out of prison than was ever conceivable. Early prison designers thought conscript labor might pay the bill. Ha! They never thought about private prisons, about the surplus value emanating from prisoners’ bodies, the aura. And at the center of all this new world global prison? Women. The fastest growing prison population, thanks largely to so-called wars on drugs and their mandatory sentencing programs. Women, mostly low income, mostly defined as members of racial minority and oppressed communities. Women constitute the haunting ghost in the prison machine. Women are not only prisoners, they are partners, spouses, mothers, friends, sisters, daughters, aunts, grandmothers, correspondents, visitors, re-visitors. They are the revenants who sustain … what? Women haunt from within, women haunt from without.

What is haunt? It’s a verb, it’s a noun; it’s an action, it’s a thing. Haunting, even etymologically, is all mixed up and messy and confusing. It mixes action and place:

“haunt: From the uncertainty of the derivation, it is not clear whether the earliest sense in F. and Eng. was to practise habitually (an action, etc.) or to frequent habitually (a place). The order here is therefore provisional.”

In Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship (Dial Press, 1948) Salvador Dali described a way in which prison haunts the eye:

“After the two months which I spent in prison during my adolescence I was able to realize the truth of the phenomenon of the so-called “flying bars” of which all prisoners speak. For a long time after their incarceration, in the most unexpected circumstances and places, they often see the bars of their prison window appear before their eyes, sometimes fixed but more often as if in flight, now standing out dark against a light background and again–more frequently–appearing as negatives, even against very light background, like the sky, for instance, on which I often observed the bars of my prison in Gerona, appearing in a blue tonality even more luminous than the sky itself. These apparitions, which lasted about three months after my liberation, made me give a good deal of thought to the persistence of retinal impressions….Thus you realize that what I am advising, good inquisitor that I am, is that you should surround yourself with a prison for your eye. For nothing is more harmful to it than the freedom to see everything, to attempt to embrace everything, to want to admire everything all at once. But the prison which I advise for your eye must be mobile, transparent, and its flying bars aerial and tiny.” (61, 62)

Surround yourself with a prison for your eye. To do so, try to focus on the women in and beyond the global prison. Ghosts move in to shield his tears. Adrienne Rich knows, the ghosts are women, but the women, haunting, are not ghosts.

(Photo Credit: Ai Weiwei / Mary Boone Gallery)